“Interesting” 5: I Hate Writing…
…but once I get started…
General
“Interesting” 4: I Owe My Career to Greenbar Fanfold Paper, BBS Software, Dumb Luck, and Because Snow Sucks
Since there was no practical way I would ever be a starship captain (my preferred career path) I spent a fair amount of my childhood with no clue or direction on what I wanted to be “when I grew up.” (Arguably, I’ve gotten around that by never growing up.) By the time I reached high … Read more
“Interesting” 3: I Wish I’d Adopted the Metric System Earlier Because My Knees Might Be Better Today
This is actually about bicycles, not the metric system. I’m not going to drone on about my position that we should just all say, “fuck it,” and start using the metric system exclusively and damn the retrograde cavemen all to hell if they can’t keep up. My dad and I shared a love for sports … Read more
“Interesting” 2: My Moral Compass (and My Sideburns) Were Shaped Almost Exclusively by Star Trek
I suspect this list shall bear witness to the fact that I can be both obsessive and compulsive. In first grade, my dad received a quarter-end report card with a note from my teacher saying, “Gene1 could be a fantastic student if he could just not fixate on Batman all the time.” It’s true. I … Read more
“Interesting” 1: I Read the 1954 Encyclopædia Britannica Cover-to-Cover
When my dad returned from the Korean War, he used the GI Bill to attend university, first studying Geology and then switching to Law. As a “Going to University Present,” my grandparents bought him a complete set of the 1954 Encyclopædia Britannica1. It was a bookshelf-worth of books (in fact, it came with a bookshelf, … Read more
The Metric Pledge
I pledge to use and internalize the Metric System in my own life wherever possible, so long as it does not impact safety. Further, I will not make it easy for others to cling to outdated measurement systems.
Part 4 – Tying It All Up – Are We Really Doing This Now?
Let’s try to put this all together in one last post, shall we? Killer Sudoku Aide is basically ready to go. The functional code has been locked down for weeks, but there have been weeks of tweaking the interface’s look, updating things to improve the accessibility, and getting ducks in a row to get it … Read more
My Journey to an iPhone App
Like a lot of nerds, I’ve been coding since I was a kid – 14 years old, in my case. Unlike a lot of them, I’m much older. Teenage coders were few and far between in 1979. When the TRS-80 was announced/came out in 1978, I was 13 years old. And I begged my dad … Read more
Part 3 – The Internet’s Original Ninja Team – Are We Really Doing This Now?
Public Access TV made way for YouTube. Public Access TV was a stipulation in the contracts with cable TV companies when they were granted city-sanctioned utility monopolies in many US cities. The idea, briefly, was that TV is a powerful medium controlled exclusively by big corporations and that community members should also have access to … Read more
Part 2 – The History of lonelocust.com – Are We Really Doing This Now?
That last post may have seemed very random. Well, life is like that. It’s not neatly wrapped up in a simplistic series of causes and effects. However, my mind requires that life is like that, so when I gather my thoughts to tell a story, the pieces must be there no matter how spurious they … Read more